To make it a copyright trifecta today, here’s an interesting story about ambiguity in how copyright applies to RSS feeds. Does merely offering an RSS feed imply that anyone can take the feed and repurpose it on another site? Many “splogs” (spam blogs) aggregate unsuspecting RSS feeds to attract keyword-driven traffic and thus make money with Adsense.
EFF’s Fred Won Lohman says, “Frankly, until there is some case law on this or related issues, we simply can’t be sure of the answers to these questions.” IP prof Eric Goldman says “In my mind, there’s no question that a blogger grants an implied license to the content in an RSS feed. However, because it’s implied, I’m just not sure of the license terms.”
I’m not sure how an RSS feed is different from any other content on the web. Unless text on a site makes it clear that a feed is available to be used any way you’d like, why would should we presume that the owner is giving up any rights? Sure, RSS is XML, which makes it easy for others to repurpose your content, and presumably you wouldn’t be publishing easy-to-repurpose XML unless you intended others to do that. However, the most prevalent consumer application of RSS are newsreaders, so I think it’s much more reasonable to assume that personal news aggregation sites publish RSS. As far as copyright is concerned, I don’t see how this kind of use is any different than browsing content on the web.
Some sites, like the New York Times, offer RSS feeds with special instructions about using them on your own site. As long as that’s not the case, the usual web norms (increasingly accepted by courts) should apply: copying even large chunks of content with attribution is fair use (a la Google News or Eyebeam’s reBlog), taking entire sites wholesale is not.
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